The Collected Prose

by Zbigniew Herbert

  Finally, the third version, and the one most probable. The captain jumps to his feet and shouts that whoever dares touch the boy will not receive his daily pay and food ration; when they return to Amsterdam he will be hanged in front of the city walls on the highest gallows. This was a completely abstract threat if one takes into consideration the hopeless situation of the shipwrecked men, but its effect was staggering. To the sailors, mad with thirst and hunger, it restored a sense of moral order and presented before them a clear image of civilization: its foundation of food, money, and a wooden pole with a cross-beam at the top.

  LONG GERRIT

  GERRIT WAS BORN in a small village near Veere, and like all the men in his family he was destined for the vocation of fisherman. In the normal course of events, after a laborious life he would pass his boat and house on to his sons, while he would be content with two yards of bitter soil. But nature, which is usually so careful in allotting shapes to all its creatures, made him different. To the distress of his parents, he grew beyond measure; at seventeen he reached the height of eight feet and five inches. Undoubtedly he was the tallest man that ever walked Dutch soil. In a mountainous country it might have been somewhat concealed; here, on a broad plain, his height was a constant though unintended provocation.

  Endowed with huge strength, he was normally quiet, gentle, and sad. He did not have friends; girls shunned him. Most of all he liked to sit in the corner of a room and watch how the dust of the earth swirled in a beam of sunlight.

  Not particularly held back by his parents, Gerrit decided to set forth in the world and make a profession of his anomaly. He wandered from village to village, from town to town; at country fairs or popular holidays he broke horseshoes, bent iron bars, threw barrels full of beer into the air lightly as balls, and stopped a galloping horse with his naked hands. He competed hard with other wonders of nature: a pig with two heads, a six-legged dog, a horse that knew how to count, as well as magicians, tightrope walkers, swallowers of melted sulfur, and clowns with stuffed bellies who fell face-down in the mud.

  Amid charlatans, fortune-tellers, and rat catchers, in a deafening racket of drums, trumpets, and the shouts of dancing processions, in the smells of meat, garlic, and sweet pastry Gerrit towered high above like a mast—and let us admit it, he earned little. In his blue eyes lurked the worry of a father of a numerous family; Gerrit’s numerous family was his huge, never-satiated body.

  One autumn morning of 1688, Long Gerrit was found in an alley not far from the Nieuwe Gracht in Haarlem. He was lying with his face down. His doublet was soaked in rain and blood, he had been stabbed repeatedly with a knife. Most likely there were many murderers, and the cotton pouch with money on his chest led one to believe it was not a robbery. The body was given to the University of Leyden, so he did not even have a decent burial. A few preachers, however, mentioned the murder in their sermons; one of them who was carried away by rhetorical fervor said Gerrit was dealt as many blows as Julius Caesar. It is not clear why this elevated analogy was used.

  Perhaps the preacher wanted us to understand that the healthy republican spirit bestows equal hatred on giants and on caesars.

  PORTRAIT IN A BLACK FRAME

  I DON’T KNOW WHY they kept choosing me, these elderly men who sat next to me in bars, cafés, on benches in parks. They made me listen to long monologues interspersed with the names of exotic islands and oceans. Who were they? Bankrupts, stripped of wealth and power. They played the role of exiled princes with the skill and routines of old actors. To their credit it must be said they were not sentimental. They knew they could not count on either applause or compassion; they separated themselves from the surrounding world with haughty spite.

  They belonged to the same race and constituted what could be called a specific kind of human species. They were betrayed by predatory faces, also by clothes that had an old-fashioned, frayed elegance: a hat with a fantastic shape rescued from a deluge, a handkerchief in the breast pocket, a tie with a large pearl, a silk scarf that had aged with them and now recalled a rope wrapped around the neck.

  As I listened to their tales I thought of a young twenty-year-old man who in 1607, a few days after Christmas, left on a ship of the Company of the Indies for the Far East. He was Jan Pieterszoon Coen1, the son of a small merchant from Hoorn. Quite a task awaited him: inspecting the Dutch colonies in Java and the Moluccas, sending reports about prospects for commerce and the political situation in this faraway land where the influences of great colonial empires rubbed against one another. Such was the beginning of an epic, innocent and without significance.

  It is difficult to say what prompted the Gentlemen of the Company to select this very young man without much experience. Was it the blind chance of fate, or was it his face that decided the choice, a face with the traits of a Spanish warrior that we know from later portraits: stubborn, domineering, an impenetrable face.

  The colonies were doing badly. Coen informed the Company of this in numerous reports, written with passion and the zeal of an apostle of white civilization. The population was demoralized and uncertain of its fate; stores, banking houses, forts, and harbors were in a deplorable state, corruption and drunkenness had reached appalling dimensions. All this took place before the eyes of the natives, who were waiting for the appropriate moment to cut the throats of the invaders.

  This is why Coen demanded weapons and an army. “Your Excellencies,” he wrote in one of his letters to the Company, “should know that we cannot conduct war without commerce, nor commerce without war.” He also requested young, morally irreproachable and hardworking Dutch to be sent to the colonies. They would replace the degenerate desperadoes. He asked his superiors—it was an unheard-of thing—to send fourteen-year-old girls from Dutch orphanages who in the future would become virtuous wives for the colonizers.

  Bursting with energy and ideas, omnipresent, tirelessly sailing between Borneo, Sumatra, the Celebes, and Java, Coen united in his personality the traits of a member of the Tribunal of Holy Inquisition and a conquistador. He was thirty when he was nominated governor-general of East India, a position that put almost unlimited power in his hands. Historical experience teaches us that it leads as a rule to crime.

  It happened that a young ensign, Cortenhoeff, was caught flirting with a twelve-year-old pupil of the Governor, Saartje Specx. They were both natural children of the Company’s employees, a couple of teenagers without a home or love. Personally and cold-bloodedly, Coen dictated a death sentence against them.

  The affair of the expedition against the islands of Ambon and Banda became well known in Europe. During a military campaign fourteen out of fifteen thousand inhabitants of these islands were murdered, and seven hundred sold into slavery. Some maintain that the real cause of the massacre was the local governor, Sonck, and Coen only gave the order for evacuation of the natives. The word “evacuation” was understood as a final evacuation and removal to the other world. Such semantic misunderstandings occur only in countries ruled by an iron hand.

  The solitude of the strong man: Coen did not have friends. Strictly speaking he had only one; it was a shameful and deeply hidden friendship.

  The great governor sneaked out at night with no bodyguard, walked the narrow streets of Batavia that were built like Amsterdam (steep roofs on the houses, canals, bridges, senseless mills milling the tropical heat), and would reach a rather dingy building where the Chinese Souw Bing Kong lived, a former ship captain and now banker—to speak more precisely, a moneylender.

  What did they talk about? About accounting, which was the hidden passion, even the love of the governor. Bing Kong would reveal the secrets of the Chinese method of business bookkeeping, and Coen would sing the charms of Italian bookkeeping. After a day filled with hard work, the administrator of the Dutch colony felt relief, comfort, almost a physical happiness when he thought of the white sheets of paper and two columns of numbers under the rubrics “owes” and “has” they ordered a complex, dark world just like the ethical
categories of good and evil. Bookkeeping for Coen was the highest form of poetry—it liberated the hidden harmony of things.

  He died in the prime of life, struck by tropical fever. The end came so suddenly he had no time to prepare a testament, or give last instructions. One might say he choked on death, but did not drink it to the end. This is probably why for long centuries he took the shape of other predators, all the way up to those I met in bars, in coffeehouses, and on park benches, the last of the species.

  THE HELL OF INSECTS

  JAN SWAMMERDAM WAS frail and sickly since birth. He was kept alive only by the art of two eminent physicians. But efforts to awaken his sleepy humors brought no results. In school he studied well but without enthusiasm; he did not show any definite interests. His father owned the prospering pharmacy By the Swan next to the town hall in Amsterdam; soon he became reconciled to the thought—but not without regret—that after his death his beautiful shop filled with smells of botany and chemistry, a collection of natural oddities, and a crocodile hanging from the ceiling, would pass into the hands of a stranger.

  After long hesitation Jan decided to study medicine at the University of Leyden. The family praised his intention and promised appropriate material aid, nourishing the quiet hope that a change of environment and scholarly discipline would positively influence and toughen the wishy-washy character of their only child.

  Jan succumbed to the charms of knowledge, and in an exaggerated way—he studied everything. He attended lectures on mathematics, theology, and astronomy; he did not neglect seminars where they read texts of ancient authors; he was also enthusiastic about Oriental languages. He gave the least attention to his chosen domain of knowledge, medicine.

  “God is sorely trying your father,” wrote Jan’s mother, “adding worries about his son’s fate to the torments of old age. You are wasting the priceless time of youth as if wandering through a forest instead of pursuing a straight path toward your goal. If within two years you do not receive a doctor’s diploma, your father will stop sending money. Such is his will.”

  Jan finished medicine. But during his entire life he did not dress a single wound. The new passion that never left him until death was the study of the world of insects. Entomology did not yet exist as a separate domain of science; Jan Swammerdam1 established its foundations.

  However, the study of the antennae of the dung beetle, of the digestive system of the wasp, of the legs of the mosquito did not bring Jan either revenue or fame. To make things worse, he was convinced he was wasting his life, devoting it to a barren and useless occupation. Religious, with inclinations toward mysticism, Swammerdam suffered because the objects of his studies were creatures on the lowest rung of the ladder of species, on the garbage heap of nature, in a neighborhood close to the hot vestibule of hell. Who can perceive God’s finger in the anatomy of a louse? Is not the one-day damsel fly a splinter of nothingness rather than a permanent brick of existence? Therefore he envied astronomers, who could study the movements of planets and discover the architecture of the universe, the laws of harmony, and the will of the Eternal.

  At night he was visited by messengers from the Heavens. They gently persuaded him to abandon his frivolous occupations. Swammerdam did not defend himself, only apologized. He promised to reform, but he knew he would never have the courage to burn his manuscripts, his beautiful, precise drawings and observations. Angels who know the secrets of the heart left him, and then a pandemonium would begin: small creatures flying low, crawling on the ground, with devils’ faces and the devil’s fierceness; they dragged Swammerdam’s tortured soul down into dust and ruin.

  The fates smiled on him only once, and ambiguously at that. The Prince of Tuscany proposed 12,000 florins for his collection of insects on condition that Swammerdam come and live in Florence—a tempting proposition—and that he accept Catholicism. This last condition was unacceptable for a man tortured by conflicts of conscience. He rejected the magnanimous offer.

  A few years before his death (he died at the age of forty-three) he looked like a decrepit old man. Swammerdam’s weak body resisted for a strangely long time, as if death despised its miserable prey and sentenced him to a long agony.

  He experienced then that the world he had studied descended inside him: it nestled there and ravaged him from within. Long trains of ants marched through the corridors of his veins, swarms of bees drank the bitter nectar of his heart, large gray and brown moths slept on his eyes. The soul that usually flies to infinity at the moment of death left Swammerdam’s tortured body prematurely. It could not bear the rustle of the wing cases, nor the senseless buzzing that disturbs the pure music of the Universe.

  PERPETUUM MOBILE

  CORNELIS DREBBEL1 WAS a famous inventor and scholar, but his colleagues treated him with reserve, reproaching him for lack of seriousness. It is a fact he was more inclined to spectacular demonstrations of his numerous abilities than to carry out systematic research. This is probably why no university ever offered him a chair. The royal courts, however, adored him.

  In 1604 he appeared in England. Within a short time he won the sympathy of the higher spheres and the monarch himself; the material proof of this was an annual pension, paid from the royal purse, and an apartment in Eltham Palace. Drebbel then became what might be called a full-time manufacturer of unusual things and phenomena: a supplier of miracles, producer of bewilderment and vertigo.

  According to contemporary accounts, two events in particular (among many) caused a real sensation and remained for a long time in human memory: a demonstration of the navigation of a submarine, constructed by the inventor, which traveled from Westminster to Greenwich without emerging from the waters of the Thames; and a great meteorological pageant in Westminster Hall in London before the king, court, and invited guests. At the pageant Drebbel’s machine hurled out thunder and lightning; suddenly in the middle of summer it became so freezing that walls were covered with frost and those who were present shivered from cold; at the end a warm, heavy rain fell and everyone melted in delight. There was no end to the applause in honor of this man who, by the power of his genius, made nature’s forces compliant to his will.

  Drebbel’s head was full of ideas both big and small, serious and ridiculous, intelligent and completely insane. He constructed a special ladder to help obese people mount a horse, he worked out a new system to drain marshy terrain, he built flying machines (malicious people called them falling machines), he made a small hammer to hit parasites on the head that was connected to tweezers which pulled the victim from the hair, he invented a sensational technological process for dyeing fabrics, also an effigy that could be set in the wind and emit frightening cries and moans. This is just a small number of the inventions of this man of unusual resourcefulness.

  Who was he in fact, a charlatan or scholar? Because we cannot look inside his soul, which has resided for a long time in the other world, we must concentrate our attention on what he left on earth. Drebbel’s library in particular, a true curiosity, provides valuable indications for those who want to study the nature of his intellect, fertile, with strokes of genius and undisciplined at the same time.

  The very arrangement of the books makes one think that Drebbel read scholarly works together with treatises by alchemists. The writings of Bacon, Leonardo da Vinci, and Giordano Bruno stood side by side with Paracelsus, The Seventh Veil of Isis, The Temple of Hiram, and The Amphitheater of Eternal Wisdom. The weed of gnosis was rampant in the garden of the natural sciences. On the margins of dissertations in the field of mechanics, chemistry, and ballistic science Drebbel drew esoteric diagrams and wrote the sonorous names of the cabala: Binah, Geburah, and Kether, which mean Intelligence, Force, and the Crown of Knowledge.

  Drebbel thought the world could not be explained in purely scientific categories, that sometimes the immutable laws of nature are not obligatory, making room for miracles and dazzling wonder. Probably this is why he built a perpetual-motion machine, improving it throughout his life (
he realized his enterprise was hopeless from the physicist’s point of view). One has to admit that on this path of madness he obtained certain results. His pendulums, windmills, spheres of light metal with weights hanging from them moved for a long time indeed, and when movement stopped the inventor pushed them with a finger, like a demiurge, awakening sleepy matter from a nap.

  After centuries when my bones have crumbled—Drebbel thought—and even my name has dissolved in mist, someone will find my clock eternally striking. I don’t count on human memory but on the memory of the universe. I want my existence to be proved like the existence of God, with an unmistakable and infallible proof: from movement, ex motu.

  HOME

  ONE CAN SAY with slight but certainly not great exaggeration that before travel began, a map existed first. Just as originally the hazy and impersonal outline of a poem drifts in the air for a long time before someone dares bring it to earth, giving it a shape understandable to men. Thus maps, the music of sirens’ songs and challenges for the daring, suggested to the Dutch a bold plan to navigate to China by a northern passage: a dark, narrow, icy corridor rather than the commonly used tropical route, full of murderous pirates and equally murderous competitors.